Horrortoberfest Day 27 – Dead Heist (2007)

I really hate to end this week with a terrible movie but then that’s the majority of what I’ve been watching anyway. Dead Heist is about a bunch of street hustlers that dream of scoring bigger than just what they can sell. One of their uncle’s tells them about a small town that has a bank that acts as a way station for the money for a bunch of other banks. They decide to knock over the bank but things start to go wrong and the robbery is ruined leaving them holed up in the building. When night falls, strange creatures start to attack the town.

This movie stars several hip hop artists in various roles and I wish I had known that this was a rapper based vanity project to begin with as they are pretty much across the board the most terrible movies ever. Snoop Dogg’s Eastsidaz won a contest I had in college for who could find the worst movie. We turned it off after 15 minutes and declared it the winner. These films generally end up with a plot that makes little to no sense and acting that a high school drama group would be embarrassed of. This movie is not an exception to this rule.

The “heist” is just a straight up robbery, which I think it just criminal. You can’t claim the word heist unless you have some complicated plan and multiple moving parts outside of “We go in with guns and demand money.” When I read the description of this movie at first I was think it was going to be like Ocean’s 11 with zombies and I was really looking forward to that. Instead we got the dumbest robbers doing the easiest robbery with the worst monsters. Seriously, they are like something you come up with as a 10 year old. They are zombie vampire werewolves. They spread infection through bite and are basically undead like zombies. They feed on blood and have to be shot in the heart to be killed like vampires. They only come out once a month to feed on the new moon like werewolves. It is some silly shit.

I’d also like to take a minute to talk about whoever decided to do the location scouting and set design for this movie because they might actually be more annoying to me than the incredibly stilted, unrealistic acting. This is supposed to mainly take place in a bank in a small town. We even see the bank from the outside and it is your standard size building. However, when they go around to “secure” the building we see that this place apparently has like 5 floors, enough for an elevator and escalators. It’s like they decided to film in an office building but instead of making it seem like a bank they just went “Fuck it, we’ve got all this space to use. Might as well film in it.” I don’t know why but every time they were in a huge stairwell or walking down some long random hallway it just made all grumpy.

I would normally have a paragraph where I talk about what I liked in the movie but there is I think maybe one semi-clever scene in the whole movie. When one of the guys is talking to his uncle and then it’s a reveal that he’s in jail. That was well shot. Good job movie. Other than that, every single scene in this movie is just amateur hour across the board. Acting, directing, lighting, set design, writing, sound. I’m giving this a 1 out of 5 and a stern shake of my head.